


Outsiders

by MissRachelThalberg



Category: The Bletchley Circle, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Romance, lady codebreakers being gay, saving the women of the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:13:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26157091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissRachelThalberg/pseuds/MissRachelThalberg
Summary: A little follow-up for S01E02 - Jean and Millie talk while Lucy's asleep.
Relationships: Millie Harcourt/Jean McBrian
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31





	Outsiders

“Jean?” whispers Millie, a little bleary-eyed, looking across at the older woman over Lucy’s sleeping form. Jean looks up from her book, smiles, checks her page number, neatly puts it down.

“Stay where you are, dear. I came by to see if you’d made any progress, and to check if - ”

“She’s fine.”

Millie sits up, careful not to disturb Lucy, slips out of the foot of the bed and joins Jean at the table, leaning in, on impulse, to kiss the other woman’s cheek. Jean looks up and gives her a smile in return.

“Sorry, I just lay down for a moment – it’s been a day. Tea?”

“A day indeed. I’ve already got the kettle on.”

As Jean emerges from the kitchenette a few minutes later, cups and saucers in hand and disapproval radiating from her very skin, Millie grins.

“I know it’s a slaughter, you can drop the attitude. You didn’t complain when I made us breakfast that time.”

Jean rolls her eyes.

“Searing hot black coffee and the rejected offer of a cigarette. Some breakfast!”

The look in her eyes, the brief touch of her hand against Millie’s, soften her words, and Millie, leaning back, lights a cigarette, waving the smoke away with manicured fingers.

“’S not quite a full Scottish, I’ll give you that.”

Then, with the sharp astuteness people never quite give her credit for:

“You wonder if they suspect anything, don’t you?”

She sees Jean wants to deny it – how does it, could it possibly, matter, with a dozen women dead in the ground, a battered friend mere feet away? And yet - Jean has always had the singular ability to worry about a range of things at once.

“Well – a bit.”

Millie’s a merry heathen, of course; Jean a conscientious Presbyterian. These are things they like about one another; these are things they don’t discuss.

“Oh, don’t worry. They don’t.”

“No?”

Millie raises one thin eyebrow.

“Not after you essentially called me an utter tit for trying to serve as bait, no.”

“You _were_ an utter tit for trying to serve as bait.”

“Always impartial, ma’am.”

Jean huffs, and Millie smiles, a little sadly, glancing over at Lucy’s pale face – so young in repose, so impossibly _young_ , and so marked by the painful purple shadows resting just under her skin.

“Still – better me than her.”

It’s Millie’s modus operandi, toughness – toughness and self-sufficiency, and a withering glance where needed and a knee to the balls if absolutely required. And anyway, she's already broken, a bit, but Lucy is whole, and Lucy…

Jean interrupts her, matter-of-factly.

“Better nobody at all. Nobody deserves what happened to her, and nobody deserves that - that - ”

“Harry.”

“Yes.”

“Say, Jean - ” Millie leans in, conspiratorially.

“Shall we sneak out and go break his knees?”

While she thoroughly relishes the suggestion, it is – mostly – meant to be hyperbole. Jean doesn’t smile.

“Believe me – it’s occurred to me.”

Millie offers her the cigarette, then, and Jean – _Jean_ – accepts a puff. They understand one another without words; outsiders both to this reality of too many women’s lives, and witnesses, too – invisible, unnatural women condemned to witnessing this happening to one’s friends, to one’s brilliant, beloved friends, and to too many quiet housewives suffering the same fate.

Millie likes men just fine, for a while, in certain circumstances, but she cannot love them. She never could.

“Well,” she starts, attempting to brazen the lead out of her heart. “There’s a reason neither of us have husbands to boast of, eh?”

Jean’s response is just one look and, despite the gravity of the situation and despite the absurdity of life, Millie allows herself a small, shaky smirk in response.

“Perhaps even more than one. Oh, _Jean_ -”

Impulsively, she reaches over to put an arm around Jean’s shoulders, rubbing the older woman’s back and entirely unsure whom she’s comforting. Millie Harcourt has plenty of words in twelve different languages, and a smattering in seven more, but somehow, none of them suffice.

“We’ll take care of her. She can live here – I’ll find her something to do, and if he ever comes here, I’ll shoot him.”

A single sideways glance.

“What? I shot a masher in Australia when he wouldn’t take no for an answer. His leg _might_ be fine again one day.”

There’s only so much disapproval even Jean McBrian is capable of in one day, Millie well knows that – but she also wasn’t quite expecting to be kissed in response to that statement – gently, spontaneously, almost gratefully. She tightens her arm around Jean and presses another kiss, a small peck, to her forehead.

“We can’t,” she begins.

“We can’t save every woman, and we can’t help those twelve poor, poor girls, but we will find the monster who killed them. And if we have to take Lucy to Lithuania and back again, we’ll save her from Harry. All right?”

Jean nods, then, and Millie smiles, sits up again, straightens her white shirt.

“Now you go back to your book while I sort out the kitchen. And once Susan’s come back and left again, to enjoy her dinner with the sainted _Timothy_ and his promotion, I’ll walk you home my very self, and no objections.”

Her wink is equal parts slightly lewd and oddly reassuring.

“It isn’t every night I get the chance to be a gentleman.”


End file.
